Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 may have been “purposely” flown around Indonesian airspace on its way to the southern Indian Ocean to avoid radar detection, a government source has claimed.
The Boeing 777, which was carrying 239 people when it disappeared on March 8, flew north of Indonesia and around that country’s airspace while making its way to the southern Indian Ocean, a senior official, who was not named, was quoted as saying.
Australian Defence Vessel Ocean Shield tows the pinger(REUTERS)
Australian Defence Vessel Ocean Shield tows the pinger(REUTERS)
The latest revelation about the missing plane came as Australian officials coordinating the international search for MH370 said they were investigating three reports that signals potentially related to the missing aircraft’s black box had been detected.
On Sunday, an Australian vessel called the Ocean Shield said its underwater “pinger locator” had detected an “acoustic event” that could be linked to the incident.
That followed claims from China that its Haixun 01 patrol vessel had detected 37.5k per second signals on Friday and Saturday that were identical to those used by the locator beacon of a flight recorder.
Angus Houston, a retired Chief Marshal from the Royal Australian Air Force who is leading the international search effort, described Ocean Shield’s find as “an important and encouraging lead, but one which I urge you to treat carefully.”
“I’m not prepared to speculate on what it might be and what it might not be,” he said.
Tony Abbott, Australia’s prime minister, described the hunt for MH370 as “the most difficult search in human history” and urged caution over the reported signals.
“We need to be very careful about coming to hard and fast conclusions too soon,” he told reporters in Tokyo.
Meanwhile, Thomas Altshuler, the vice president of the company which makes the hand-held “pinger locator” apparently being used by the Chinese crew of Haixun 01 cast doubt on whether such a device would have been able to detect a signal coming from so far beneath the ocean.
“It is possible to detect something at that depth with a hand-held device, but I don’t know how probable,” Mr Altshuler, from Teledyne Marine Systems, said. “You would need to be close. You are not going to be 3,000 meters above it and two miles away.”
The Chinese search team on board the patrol vessel Haixun 01 uses an instrument to detect electronic pulses (AP)
The British ship HMS Echo, which is also using a pinger locator, began making its way to the area where China’s Haixun 01 patrol ship made its discovery on Sunday.
It is now one of 13 ships and 12 planes searching three search areas located around 1,240 miles northwest of Perth, officials from Australia’s Joint Agency Coordination Centre said on Sunday.
Mr Houston, the Australian official, admitted search teams were “running out of time.” “This is day 30 of the search and the advertised time for the life of the batteries is 30 days.”
TELEGRHAP
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